Microsoft’s E3 2011 Press Conference – Our Thoughts

Microsoft has just closed out their E3 press conference, and we’re all talking about it here in our secret GameFront volcano lair. In case you missed it, here’s what we thought about it:

Ron Whitaker: The Modern Warfare 3 stuff was impressive. As always, Infinity Ward nails set pieces. I was intrigued by the new Tomb Raider, although there were a lot of Quick Time Events. Gears 3 is exactly what you’d expect. Everything else seemed to be Kinect related, and most of it was underwhelming. There was a lot of visible lag in the interactions, and many of the titles just weren’t grabbing me. Was Mass Effect screaming out for voice controls? Do we really need a Fable game on rails? The obligatory Halo 4 announcement was vague enough to be almost ignored. P.S. Don’t announce a trilogy before the first game hits! Grade: C

Phil Owen: The controller-based stuff (Tomb Raider, Modern Warfare 3, Halo 4, looked pretty cool, but the Kinect stuff was wildly underwhelming. It looks like they’re going for quantity over quality on Kinect. At least they’re pushing out new games for it, I guess. Grade: C

CJ Miozzi: A handful of potential gems mired in a deluge of motion-control that promises to have gamers awkwardly twitching and flailing through cumbersome and unnecessary movement mechanics. Grade: C

Ross Lincoln: Nothing in the history of Kinect has managed to convince me that it is anything other than a fun gimmick. Shoehorning Kinect functionality into a game like Mass Effect spectacularly fails to convince me. Grade: C

Jeff Mills (GameFront Community Manager): While non-Kinect presentations were all right, the Kinect presentations were laggy and unimpressive. Between the annoying actors trying a little too hard to sound excited, and just “meh” gameplay I was left with the decision to never get the Kinect for my XBox. Grade: C-

So, there you have it. It looks like our team was uniform in awarding Microsoft’s offering a solid “Meh.” Our overall grade is a uniform C.

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